A collection of archaeological materials and burial remains, recovered during large scale excavations or by accidental discovery by travellers and locals, are presented in this volume on sixth- to seventh century mortuary and funerary practices in during the Achaemenid and Sasanian period in Iran. Much of this material has been poorly published in the past, or not been published at all. The author has collected a wide range of data to shed light on mortuary and funerary practices of cultures within the ancient Persian Empire who lived near or inside the borders of modern-day Iran.

During recent years new excavations at a number of Neolithic locations in the Central Zagros by German, British and Iranian archaeologists have revealed a series of important results. Notable are the Early Neolithic sites of Choga Golan, Jani, Sheikh-e Abad, and East Chia Sabz, all discovered and excavated within the last ten years. In this volume Hojjat Darabi gives a survey of the discoveries on which our knowledge is based. The book is set in a chronological frame, in an environmental context, and in a regional and theoretical perspective. It is illustrated by a number of useful photos, drawings charts and diagrams. The book is a presentation of our knowledge about Neolithic Revolution as it appears right now; in addition, its provides an outline of further steps for future research.

Bizat Ruhama is an Early Pleistocene site located on the fringe of the Negev Desert, Israel, in the southern coastal plain of the southern Levant. This book presents the results of recent excavations carried out at the site and technological analysis of its lithic industry. The excavations (2004-5) had three major goals: firstly to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental context of the site; secondly to provide large lithic assemblages for detailed technological and behavioral studies; and finally to verify the primary context of the lithic and faunal assemblages. The results of the new excavations suggest that Bizat Ruhama is a site complex containing a number of roughly contemporaneous occupations. The analysis of the lithic assemblages from different occupation areas are presented in this study.

No Place Like Home: Ancient Near Eastern Houses and Households had its genesis in a series of six popular and well-attended ASOR conference sessions on Household Archaeology in the Ancient Near East. A selection of papers are presented here, together with four invited contributions. The 18 chapters are organized in three thematic sections. Chapters in the first, Architecture as Archive of Social Space, profile houses as records of the lives of inhabitants, changing and adapting with residents; many offer a background focus on how human behavior is shaped by the walls of one’s own home. This section also includes innovative approaches to understanding who dwelled in these homes. For instances, one chapter explores evidence for children in a house, another surveys what it was like to live in a military barracks. The middle section, The Active Household, focuses on the evidence for how residents carried out household activities including work and food preparation. Chapters include the ‘heart of household archaeology’ in their application of activity area research, but also drill down to the social significance of what residents were doing or eating, and where such actions were taking place. The final section, Ritual Space at Home, features studies on the house as ritual space. The entire complement of chapters provides the latest research on houses and households spanning the Chalcolithic to the Roman periods and from Turkey to Egypt.

Recent archaeobotanical results from early Neolithic sites on Cyprus have put the island in the forefront of debates on the spread of Near Eastern agriculture, with domestic crops appearing on the island shortly after they evolved. The results from these early sites changed what was known about the timing of the introduction of farming to the island. However, what happened after the introduction of agriculture to Cyprus has been less discussed. This book explores the role of new crop introductions, local agricultural developments, and intensification in subsequent economic and social developments on Cyprus corresponding with the island's evidence of ongoing social transformations and changing off-island patterns of contacts. In addition to contributing to discussions on the origins and spread of Near Eastern agriculture, it contributes to current archaeological debates on external contact and the influence of the broader Near East on the development of the island's unique prehistoric economy. This research is a chronological and regional analysis of the botanical record of Cyprus and a comparison of data from similarly dated sites in the Levantine mainland, Turkey, and Egypt. Further, it includes data from four recently excavated Cypriot prehistoric sites, Krittou Marottou-'Ais Yiorkis, Kissonerga-Skalia, Souskiou-Laona, and Prastion-Mesorotsos.

In the late 4th century AD, the site of Kourion, Cyprus was destroyed by an earthquake that struck with little or no warning, trapping victims and objects where they lay. Although much of the site was reoccupied and rebuilt, some areas were not, thus providing a unique example of a moment truly frozen in time. This work presents the results of a comprehensive study of the architecture, stratigraphy, and material culture assemblage recovered from the Earthquake House, a multi-roomed domestic structure destroyed during this seismic event. The architectural analysis revealed a number of modifications to the structure that increased its overall size and subdivided its internal spaces, although their timing and reasons remain unknown at present. Study of the artifact assemblage provided significant insights into the processes surrounding the use, re-use, and discard of artifacts. This analysis identified numerous behaviors including consumable and non-consumable storage, storage of material for reuse and/or recycling, food preparation, and waste disposal, including a partial reconstruction of the domestic waste stream. This study produced a more nuanced model for understanding the distribution of artifacts in ancient domestic contexts and demonstrates that even in cases of near instantaneous destruction without significant disturbance, a wide variety of variables must be considered when examining the artifacts of domestic assemblages.

In this book Philip Bes summarises the results of his PhD thesis (Catholic University of Leuven) on the analysis of production trends and complex, quantified distribution patterns of the principal traded sigillatas and slipped table wares in the Roman East, from the early Empire to Late Antiquity (e.g. Italian Sigillata, Eastern Sigillata A, B and C, Candarli ware, Phocean Red Slip Ware/LRC, Cypriot Red Slip Ware/LRD and African Red Slip Wares). He draws on his own work in Sagalassos and Boeotia, as well as an exhaustive review of archaeological publications of ceramic data. The analysis compares major regional blocks, documenting coastal as well as inland sites, and offers an interpretation of these complex data in terms of the economy and possible distribution mechanisms.

This volume contains a selection of articles based on papers presented at an international workshop held at Frankfurt am Main, Germany from the 27th to the 28th of October, 2012. The workshop was organized by members of the Research Training Group 1576 "Value and Equivalence" and the Tell Chuera Project. The articles address a wide range of materials (lithics, terracotta figurines, domestic architecture and installations, glyptics) and topics (the organization of space within residential areas, the economic base of 3rd millennium settlements, an anthropological perspective on the study of domestic remains) which are related to the study of 3rd millennium BCE houses and households in northern Mesopotamia. Many articles focus on recent archaeological excavations and observations from Tell Chuera, but hitherto unpublished field data from other sites (Tell Mozan, Tell Hazna, and Kharab Sayyar) are also presented. The archaeological focus of the volume is broadened by a philological treatise dealing with the study of households in southern Mesopotamia.

Eight papers arising from a colloquium on Warfare and Society in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean held at the University of Liverpool, 13th June 2008.

The first section of the present volume is a report of the Italian involvement in Southern Makr n and Khar n, its aims and objects, modus operandi. It is essentially restricted to the Islamic era and represents a discourse preliminary to the second section. The methodological approach of combining historical sources (written and manuscript, Persian and Arabic) with archaeological evidence and geo-morphological study has allowed for a re-reading of the traditional literature and the role played by Makr n and, in particular, the K j-u-Makr n region during the 10th-13th Centuries AD. Many questions put by this mystifying region still stand only partly answered, if not completely un-answered. After three seasons of archaeological field-work and research complemented with accurate geo-morphological surveys and studying we are still confronted with an elusive region and some crucial queries. Part Two of this study is the follow up of the archaeological and geo-morphological research-work: a historical study, which focuses on the 10th-13th Centuries AD."

The Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel initiated an archaeological salvage project in portions of the central and southern Negev (Israel). As a participant in the Negev Emergency Survey, Mordechai Haiman's field crew surveyed, from 1979-1989, 450 kilometers in the western Negev Highlands, and identified 1,500 sites. He also directed excavations at 33 sites. Funded by a grant from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications, this fieldwork was reanalyzed for publication. The contents of this final report touch upon various aspects of Haiman's excavations and surveys including methodologies, lithic material, pottery, fauna remains, petrographic analysis and more.

In an expansion of his 2012 Robson Classical Lectures, Clifford Ando examines the connection between the nature of the Latin language and Roman thinking about law, society, and empire. Drawing on innovative work in cognitive linguistics and anthropology, Roman Social Imaginaries considers how metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and ideation helped create the structures of thought that shaped the Roman Empire as a political construct. Beginning in early Roman history, Ando shows how the expansion of the empire into new territories led the Romans to develop and exploit Latin's extraordinary capacity for abstraction. In this way, laws and institutions invented for use in a single Mediterranean city-state could be deployed across a remarkably heterogeneous empire. Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in Roman Social Imaginaries constitute some of today's most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.

An examination of archaeology in Jordan and Palestine, Competitive Archaeology in Jordan explores how antiquities have been used to build narratives and national identities. Tracing Jordanian history, and the importance of Jerusalem within that history, Corbett analyzes how both foreign and indigenous powers have engaged in a competition over ownership of antiquities and the power to craft history and geography based on archaeological artifacts. She begins with the Ottoman and British Empires—under whose rule the institutions and borders of modern Jordan began to take shape—asking how they used antiquities in varying ways to advance their imperial projects. Corbett continues through the Mandate era and the era of independence of an expanded Hashemite Kingdom, examining how the Hashemites and other factions, both within and beyond Jordan, have tried to define national identity by drawing upon antiquities. Competitive Archaeology in Jordan traces a complex history through the lens of archaeology’s power as a modern science to create and give value to spaces, artifacts, peoples, narratives, and academic disciplines. It thus considers the role of archaeology in realizing Jordan’s modernity—drawing its map; delineating sacred and secular spaces; validating taxonomies of citizens; justifying legal frameworks and institutions of state; determining logos of the nation for display on stamps, currency, and in museums; and writing history. Framing Jordan’s history in this way, Corbett illustrates the manipulation of archaeology by governments, institutions, and individuals to craft narratives, draw borders, and create national identities.

‘Moving on from Ebla, I crossed the Euphrates’ collects six articles by leading international scholars on the culture of the Assyrian world as a homage to Paolo Matthiae on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Paolo Matthiae is known internationally for the discovery of the site of ancient Ebla in Syria, but he also wrote groundbreaking books and scientific contributions about the Assyrians, predominantly from an art historical perspective. The articles deal with different aspects of this culture, with innovative and sometimes unexpected points of view, including the reception of some elements of the Assyrian culture in the contemporary world.

The Ka.Y.A. project began in Ahlat (East Turkey) in 2007, by Centro Studi Sotterranei / Centre for Underground Studies of Genoa (Italy), in the main project 'Eski Ahlat Sehri Kazis' (The Ahlat ancient city excavation) directed from 2005 to 2010 by Dr. Prof. Nakis Karamagarali (Gazi University, Ankara). The Ka.Y.A. project aims to identify and study the rock-cut sites around Ahlat, as completion of major archaeological excavations in the ancient city located on the northern shores of Lake Van. The Ahlat region is a huge area, at an altitude between 1,700 and 2,500 m, and wedged between massive volcanic systems. During four years of research (2007-2010) the archaeo-speleologist team documented 395 rock-cut sites and underground structures most of which date back to medieval and post-medieval times, relating to different cultures and religions: Armenian, Seljuk, Ilkhanid, Kara Koyunlu, Ak Koyunlu and Ottoman. The results of the first survey campaign were completed in 2007 and published as BAR S2293 (2011), the second campaign 2008 is available as BAR S2560 (2013). These volumes are now supplemented by the new discoveries uncovered during the third season in 2009, with the hope to publish as soon as possible the results of the last mission completed in 2010.

One of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) is known for his path-breaking studies of ancient Greek and Roman history. The encyclopedic knowledge of the ancient world that Momigliano brought to his work, however, enabled him to make connections between ancient history and the subsequent study of that history. His sweeping vision stretched from antiquity to the present day. In Momigliano and Antiquarianism, Peter N. Miller brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to provide the first serious study of Momigliano's history of historical scholarship. At its core, this collection is devoted to one of Momigliano's most celebrated subjects the history of antiquarianism, and one of his most audacious claims, that the decay of early modern antiquarianism actually gave birth to the modern cultural sciences - history, sociology, anthropology, art history, archaeology, and history of religion. Filling a gap in the scholarship, this erudite collection will prove fascinating to teachers and students of classics, history, and the human sciences.

This book is the first investigation of the relationship between Palmyra and its surrounding territory from the Roman to the early Islamic period since D. Schlumberger's pioneer campaigns in the mountains northwest of Palmyra in the late 1930s. It discusses the agricultural potential of the hinterland, its role in the food supply of the city, and the interaction with the nomadic networks on the Syrian dry steppe. The investigation is based on an extensive joint Syrian-Norwegian surface survey north of Palmyra in 2008, 2010 and 2011 and on studies of satellite imagery. It contains a gazetteer of 70 new sites, which include numerous villages, estates, forts, stations and water management systems.

This research takes an integrative approach to the study of Hellenistic cult and cultic practices in an important part of western Asia by employing a combination of archaeological, numismatic and historical evidence. Although any thorough investigation of Seleukid religion would prove illuminating in itself, this research uses religion as a lens through which to explore the processes of acculturation and rejection within a colonial context. It discusses the state attitude towards, and manipulation of, both Hellenic and indigenous beliefs and places this within a framework developed out of a series of case studies exploring evidence for religion at a regional level. The study outlines the development of religious practices and expression in the region which formed the birthplace of the modern world's three most influential monotheistic religions.

Resheph was quite a popular god in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC - especially in Syria - but during the 1st millennium his cult became extinct. Finally it was only maintained in several peripheral and isolated sites, such as in the Palmyra desert and in Cyprus. Maciej M. Munnich presents the written sources which mentioned Resheph and analyzes the features of Resheph's cult. He emphasizes that there is no confirmation for the theory that Resheph was a lord of the netherworld. Resheph was a belligerent, aggressive god who used diseases to attack people, but who could also heal. In Egypt, Resheph was originally venerated as the deity who supported the Pharaoh in battles, but then he was summoned mainly because of illness and everyday needs. In ancient Israel, Resheph was at first reduced to the level of a demonic assistant of Yahweh, but his name then became a common term, always however in reference to the character of the deity. Among the Hurrites, Resheph appeared as a divine guardian of trade. He was not treated as a solely harmful, dangerous god, as has been suggested in numerous previous studies.

Contents: Mikhail Abramzon: A hoard of bronze Pontic and Bosporan coins of the reign of Mithradates VI from Phanagoria, 2007; Anna Alexandropoulou: The Late Classical and Hellenistic pottery of Sinope and Amisos; William Anderson and Abby Robinson: Marginal or mainstream? The character of settlement in Late Roman Paphlagonia; Sumer Atasoy: New exploration of the southern Black Sea coast: Filyos - Tios; Eka Avaliani: Ancient Anatolia: cultural mosaic, not melting pot; Lucretiu Mihailescu-Birliba: Les Pontobithyniens en Dacie romaine; Thomas Bruggemann: Paphlagonia between Goths, Sasanids and Arabs (3rd-8th centuries AD); Ertekin Doksanalti and Gungor Karauguz: The Hellenistic and Roman ceramics from field surveys at Devrek and its environs, west Black Sea region of Turkey; Sevket Donmez: A new excavation in Pontus: Amasya-Oluz Hoyuk. Preliminary results for the Hellenistic period and Iron Age layers; Dimitris P. Drakoulis: Regional transformations and the settlement network of the coastal Pontic provinces in the Early Byzantine period; Cristian E. Ghita: The Pontic army: integrating Persian and Macedonian traditions; J.G.F. Hind: Milesian and Sinopean traders in Colchis (Greeks at Phasis and the ransoming of shipwrecked sailors); Monica M. Jackson: The Amisos Treasure: a Hellenistic tomb from the age of Mithradates Eupator; Gungor Karauguz, Ozsen Corumluoglu, Ibrahim Kalayci and Ibrahim Asri: A 3D digital photogrammetric model of a Roman 'birdrock monument' in the north-west region of Anatolia; Merab Khalvashi and Emzar Kakhidze: Sinopean amphorae in Apsarus; Liudmila G. Khrushkova: Chersonesus in the Crimea: Early Byzantine capitals with fine-toothed acanthus leaves; Liudmila G. Khrushkova and Dmitri E. Vasilinenko: Basilica Lesnoe-1 near Sochi in the north-eastern Black Sea region; Sergei A. Kovalenko The Hestiatorion of the Chaika settlement in the north-western Crimea; Ergun Lafli und Eva Christof: Drei neu entdeckte Phallossteine aus der Chora von Hadrianopolis; Boris Agomedov and Sergey Didenko: Red Slip Ware in Chernyakhov culture; Iulian Moga: Strabo on the Persian Artemis and Men in Pontus and Lydia; Kyrylo Myzgin: Finds of Roman coins of Asia Minor provincial mintage in the territory of Chernyakhov Culture; Alexander V. Podossinov: Bithynia, Paphlagonia and Pontus on the Tabula Peutingeriana; Jean-Louis Podvin: Cultes isiaques en Pont et Paphlagonie; Elena A. Popova and Tatiana V. Egorova: Investigation of the Late Scythian cinder heap on the site of Chaika near Evpatoria in the north-west Crimea; Annette Teffeteller: Strategies of continuity in the construction of ethnic and cultural identity: the lineage and role of Zeus Stratios in Pontus and Paphlagonia; Bruno Tripodi: Paphlagonian horseman in Cunaxa (Xenophon Anabasis 1. 8. 5); Gocha R. Tsetskhladze: The southern Black Sea coast and its hinterland: an ethno-cultural perspective; Maya Vassileva: The rock-cut monuments of Phrygia, Paphlagonia and Thrace: a comparative overview; Jose Vela Tejada: Stasis and polemos at Pontus in the first half of the 4th century BC according to Aeneas Tacticus: the Datames' siege of Sinope; Fred C. Woudhuizen; The saga of the Argonauts: a reflex of Thraco-Phrygian maritime encroachment on the southern Pontic littoral; Luca Zavagno: Amastris (Paphlagonia): a study in Byzantine urban history between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages; Elena A. Zinko: Peculiarities of the paintings of Bosporan crypts of the 3rd-6th centuries AD; Two Appendices: Pessinus in Phrygia: Brief Preliminary Report of the 2010 Field Season.

This book surveys four thousand years of pottery production and presents totally unexpected fresh information, using technical and analytical methods. It provides a study of ancient pottery of Jerusalem, from the earliest settlement to the medieval city and brings to light important aspects that cannot be discovered by the commonly accepted morphological pottery descriptions. New insights include the discovery that third millennium BCE pottery appears to have been produced by nomadic families, middle Bronze Age ceramics were made by professional potters in the Wadi Refaim, the pottery market of the Iron Age II pottery cannot be closely dated and is still produced during the first centuries after the exile, and the new shapes are made by Greek immigrant potters. The book contains a chapter on the systematics of ceramic studies and numerous notes about the potters themselves.